


Freedom Ride

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Prompt Fic, Rebels, Rescue Missions, Space Opera, Spaceships, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-28
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-23 19:03:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4888402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aradia and Kanaya, in the moments before a guerrilla raid on Battleship Condescension.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Freedom Ride

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GracefulArchitect](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GracefulArchitect/gifts).



> This ficlet was written for [gracefularchitect](http://gracefularchitect.tumblr.com) in response to the prompt: _Kanaya, Aradia, Prompt word: whoops_.

"'Whoops?' That is not a reassuring word coming from a starship," Kanaya said with an equally unreassuring dryness in her voice.

Aradia couldn't move much in the helmsrig, but she spared a brief flare of teek to flap a dismissive biowire in her crewmate's direction. "Don't get sarcastic at me, everything is under control! We're just making an emergency landing behind the exhaust vents of Battleship Condescension. Looks like we get to test Equius's voidy thing against live trolls a few days earlier than planned." She toggled on the ship-wide intercom and repeated the last two sentences for the benefit of the crew at large, then routed all complaint calls to Karkat up on the bridge.

Kanaya seemed to be struggling between an impulse to disapprove of Aradia's approach to protocol and an equally strong impulse to laugh. She compromised by setting down her pruning shears (biowires could and would take over an entire helmsblock within a week if they weren't properly tended) and resting a hand on the control board, next to the bank of buttons and levers formerly marked Emergency Failsafes and now either melted into slag or relabeled Let Aradia Have A Life (WITHOUT ELECTROCUTING HER IN THE PROCESS, NUMBGLOBES). "Do you want to accompany the boarding party?" she asked.

"It would be fun, wouldn't it? But no." Aradia sighed. "It's more important to ensure we have a quick escape than to throw another body into danger. I'll do what I can to lure some ghosts through the hull and pass on any useful information. Just don't get captured. The point of a rescue mission is to leave with _more_ people than we came with, not the other way around."

"We'll bring Sollux and Feferi back," Kanaya promised.

Only if that was the way things had to go to make the timeline work, Aradia thought. And she didn't know the future anymore. She had no way to be sure that saving her matesprit and moirail -- saving an Heiress who wanted to dismantle her heritage and the most powerful psionic hatched in generations, who also happened to be the descendant of a heretical rebel cult leader -- wouldn't spark some even worse catastrophe down the line.

But no. That was the voice of futility and the empty dead. She was alive, her friends were out of the game, and this time around they were going to make the universe bend toward justice, Empire and Empress be damned.

"Yeah," Aradia said. "Of course you will. And then we can _really_ get to work."


End file.
